This paper examines how AI ethics has been developed at the national level in Japan, and what this process reveals about broader Japanese state imaginaries of how advanced technology should be developed and used, and what a future with these technologies should look like. Key developments in the Japanese government’s approach to AI ethics and governance between 2014 and 2023 are laid out, based on an analysis of official reports and policy documents supplemented by data collected via semi-structured interviews with three expert members of the committees that formulated several key sets of ethical principles. The paper considers Japan’s positioning in the global race to develop AI ethics principles over this period, as well as the imaginary of AI within the wider historical context of imaginaries about the knowledge society in Japan. I suggest three ways in which AI ethics has been understood and instrumentalized in the Japanese context, and argue that the main methodology used to date—ELSI—complements the government’s utopian and techno-determinist imaginaries of the future while concealing a deeply conservative approach that serves to reproduce structural inequalities and discrimination despite the apparent internationalism and progressive values that are repeatedly expressed in state-promoted ethical principles.
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In recent years, criticism has been building about the proliferation of sets of ethical principles for artificial intelligence (AI) among technology corporations, national governments and international organizations, even as ethically problematic deployments of AI have also multiplied. Wagner (Citation2018) has critiqued practices of “ethics-washing” or selective “ethics shopping” by corporations and governments in an effort to delay regulation of the sector, while Mittelstadt (Citation2019) suggests that even seemingly universally accepted ethical principles “hide deep political and normative disagreement.” Munn goes further, arguing that AI ethical principles are “useless” because
these are meaningless principles which are contested or incoherent, making them difficult to apply; they are isolated principles situated in an industry and education system which largely ignores ethics; and they are toothless principles which lack consequences and adhere to corporate agendas. (Munn Citation2023; original emphases)
Such criticisms appeared further validated when a succession of large tech companies, despite adopting such principles, fired or sidelined their ethics teams (Grant and Weise Citation2023). However, while sets of AI ethics principles may have met with limited success so far in realizing the ethical design, development and deployment of AI systems, a focus on how such principles are developed can shed light on the processes by which ethical values are understood, interpreted, and codified, by whom and according to what logics; how ethical values relating to advanced technologies are intertwined with imaginaries about those technologies and technological futures; and the political and economic ends towards which AI ethics principles are aimed.
